Drag racing
Originating from illegal street racing in the United States in the late 1940s, "drag racing" is a controlled test of pure acceleration.
Drag races occur on straight, level tracks of (generally) one-quarter of a mile (402.33 meters) in length, with additional distance for the competitors to slow down after the finish. Two cars race each other to the end of the measured distance. The winning car goes on to the next round of competition, the other is eliminated from the competition, in round-robin fashion.
There are many classes of drag racing, featuring everything from stock and near-stock street-legal cars, to heavily modified and altered purpose-built race cars, to the "Funny Car" which is exotic custom-built drag cars with bodies that look (somewhat) like standard production vehicles, to the open-wheel, nitromethane-burning "Top Fuel" dragsters, the so-called "kings" of the sport. The fastest 'top fuelers' can attain terminal speeds of nearly 330 miles-per-hour while covering the quarter mile distance in roughly 4.5-seconds! (There are even categories for motorcycle drag races.)
The faster categories of drag racing are an impressive spectacle, with engines of over 4000 horsepower and noise outputs to match, cars that look like bizarre parodies of standard street cars, and the ritual of "burnouts" where, prior to the actual timed run, the competitors cause their wheels to spin while stationary or moving slowly, thus heating up the tires and laying down a sticky coat of rubber on the track surface to get optimum grip on the all-important initial "launch."
To allow wildly different cars to compete against each other, some competitions are raced on a handicap basis, with faster cars delayed on the start line enough to theoretically even things up with the slower car.
While usually thought of as an American pastime, drag racing is also very popular in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and most European nations, especially the Scandinavian countries.
While drag-racing has traditionally been the domain of big - usually American - cars with high-capacity engines, there has been an increase in what has been called (outside of Japan, anyway) "import drag racing", where smaller Japanese cars are raced. Use of a turbocharger or supercharger is very common, and often necessary to break through the 12-second quarter-mile barrier.
One of the negative side-effects of import drag-racing is that the cheaper cars involved are often raced (illegally) on the street, where they cause trouble, with many drivers making a public nuisance of themselves. Illegal import street-racing was glamorised in the movie "The Fast and The Furious".
A few stars of Drag Racing: